During this mini-project, I worked with the same group that I am going to be building my To Kill a Mockingbird roller coaster with: myself, Annette Garcia, and Nadia Kireyko. Working with this group went smoothly, aside from a few difficulties with communication, which is good considering that I'm working with this group for a much larger multi-week project. Besides, we got the communication issues all worked out, so I'm expecting few major issues with the roller coaster project.
In this mini-project, we went to Belmont Park, and rode the roller coaster there, called the Giant Dipper. We then had two tasks: we had to sketch the roller coaster and write a poem or short story, the plot/theme/topic of which would follow the track of the coaster (a wide turn on the coaster corresponds to a turning point in the poem/story). I was in charge of drawing the roller coaster. Through this project, I learned how to graph in three dimensions, with coordinates x, y, and z. I was forced to learn how to do this by my complete inability to draw anything free-hand and have it turn out at least 25% what I mean it to. I have used 3-D graphing a lot, actually, for blueprints, other sketches, and the like, so all's well that ends well. You can see my first draft (a side view and arial view of the coaster), my second draft (where I got the coordinate points from), and my final draft, as well as our poem, above in the slideshow.
I surprised myself with the 3-D graphing, actually. It was the first time I had ever tried to do anything in three dimensions, and it went pretty well. Another thing that went well was successfully finishing the poem on time, against all odds. Our chief struggle, and the thing that made finishing the poem so difficult, was our communication, as I mentioned before. We ended up needing to finish the mini-project over the weekend. We knew each other's emails, and I tried to get ahold of my group to try to finish the project on Sunday (I was at the beach all of Saturday), but I couldn't get ahold of anyone. I didn't have any phone numbers; I finally got them from the school roster when I tried to call my teacher to ask for an extension on the project, so we worked for a bit on it on Sunday. We turned out to have 30 minutes on Monday, and we worked more efficiently than we had ever before to finish it before we had to present it! Learning from our mistake, we exchanged phone numbers, so an issue like that shouldn't come up again.
If I could go back and do the project again, I would have taken my final draft of the sketch, digitally cropped out just the coaster part, blown it up to a full page, and then used that as my final draft. It would have made the coaster a lot easier to both look at and follow; in my current final sketch, the graph takes up a lot of space on the page. I don't really have anything that I would change on the poem; that came out well.
In this mini-project, we went to Belmont Park, and rode the roller coaster there, called the Giant Dipper. We then had two tasks: we had to sketch the roller coaster and write a poem or short story, the plot/theme/topic of which would follow the track of the coaster (a wide turn on the coaster corresponds to a turning point in the poem/story). I was in charge of drawing the roller coaster. Through this project, I learned how to graph in three dimensions, with coordinates x, y, and z. I was forced to learn how to do this by my complete inability to draw anything free-hand and have it turn out at least 25% what I mean it to. I have used 3-D graphing a lot, actually, for blueprints, other sketches, and the like, so all's well that ends well. You can see my first draft (a side view and arial view of the coaster), my second draft (where I got the coordinate points from), and my final draft, as well as our poem, above in the slideshow.
I surprised myself with the 3-D graphing, actually. It was the first time I had ever tried to do anything in three dimensions, and it went pretty well. Another thing that went well was successfully finishing the poem on time, against all odds. Our chief struggle, and the thing that made finishing the poem so difficult, was our communication, as I mentioned before. We ended up needing to finish the mini-project over the weekend. We knew each other's emails, and I tried to get ahold of my group to try to finish the project on Sunday (I was at the beach all of Saturday), but I couldn't get ahold of anyone. I didn't have any phone numbers; I finally got them from the school roster when I tried to call my teacher to ask for an extension on the project, so we worked for a bit on it on Sunday. We turned out to have 30 minutes on Monday, and we worked more efficiently than we had ever before to finish it before we had to present it! Learning from our mistake, we exchanged phone numbers, so an issue like that shouldn't come up again.
If I could go back and do the project again, I would have taken my final draft of the sketch, digitally cropped out just the coaster part, blown it up to a full page, and then used that as my final draft. It would have made the coaster a lot easier to both look at and follow; in my current final sketch, the graph takes up a lot of space on the page. I don't really have anything that I would change on the poem; that came out well.